The Straight Boy Problem

I'm a bisexual girl, and as my brain frequently points out to me, I am so, so very bisexual. I'll be lusting after Scarlett Johansson, and five minutes later drooling over Samuel Larsen. But (and this has caused me some worry over the last few months), attractive as they are, I actually have no interest in dating men.

Or, at least, I have little interest in dating only very few. For lack of a better word, I'm going to call this the straight boy problem.

Being privileged makes people annoying to other, less privileged people. White people, able-bodied people, rich people, cisgender people. Straight people. Irritating as hell if you're not one of them.

Particularly straight men. Particularly straight boys. They are so wrapped up in their own privilege they can't see two metres in front of them, and attractive though they might be, this makes them profoundly annoying. And it only takes five minutes of hanging out with someone profoundly annoying before they're about as attractive as three week old unrefrigerated pizza.

I like men. They're cute. They have the jaws that do the thing and the hair that does the thing and the hip bones that do the thing. But god, I can barely spend five minutes with them anymore.

I'm not a child!

When I was in my mid teens, every time I read a character protesting that they're 'not a child!' I'd scoff and think 'only a child says that'. I promised myself that I'd never say that, and by that, prove my own adulthood.

God I was naive.

I was a child. And I still am. If given the choice between the fun and the sensible decision, I will always make the fun one. I can't save money to save my life. I still eat three magnums a day, just because I can. I don't wash my clothes until I'm literally having to dig through the laundry basket to find the cleanest pair of underwear. I don't wash the dishes until we've run out of forks. My room has been cleaned once in the almost two years I've lived here and it wasn't even me who did it. My desk is piled with more rubbish than a skip outside a building site. I claim to want to write as a career, but I actually write fuck-all because watching How I Met Your Mother is easier.

I probably moved out of home way too early. I keep telling myself that if I moved into my very own place I'd keep it tidy because it would be my space, and mine alone, but that's probably bullshit. I didn't just get pushed into the deep end without taking swimming lessons. I jumped, willingly and happily, and had the audacity to be shocked when I couldn't touch the bottom. Sometimes I want to swim to the shallow end, or even just climb out of the pool entirely, and only my bone-deep pigheadedness is stopping me.

I'm not sure how to end this. Do I make some sort of sarcastically witty quip and leave you dejected, or do I dig into my store of optimism, which feels like it's running lower every day, and tell you that of course I'll get better - I'll publish a book, or get a better job, or learn how to save money, or finally be able to live completely on my own without any assistance from my parents, or move to Melbourne or London or New York and become a superstar?

I don't know if any of that will happen. I have no idea what the next five or ten or fifty years will bring. But I'll be damned if I let them be boring.

Next time I'm feeling discouraged, next time I'm clicking from my Google docs tab over to Netflix, and next time I sigh in self-loathing and go to the freezer for that third magnum, I need to get out this post, dust it off, and remind myself that I promised the internet, and more importantly myself, that I wasn't going to be boring any more. And then I need to close down Netflix, ignore the call of that magnum, and write the damn novel. Because the only way I'm going to have the life I want is if I get off my arse and fight for it.